


Story in the Picture Frame

by navaan



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bittersweet, F/F, Fluff, Gen, POV Female Character, Post-Episode: s04e08-09 Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Post-Season/Series 12, Reunions, Secrets, Vignette, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27865666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: Yaz finds the picture of a woman while searching a storage room in the Tardis. The Doctor isn't just going to tell the story though.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor/River Song
Comments: 10
Kudos: 134
Collections: Public Call - Doctor Who fic exchange 2020





	Story in the Picture Frame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lsellers (Annariel)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annariel/gifts).



"Who's this?" 

The heavy picture frame looked out of place in the storage of that Tardis that was filed with all kinds of technological junk that Yasmin couldn't identify. The woman in the picture had curly hair, wore a laid back smile - but what was truly remarkable about her were her eyes that were twinkling with happiness or mirth as she looked off into the distance beyond the camera.

The Doctor looked up, her hair sticking every which way, a smudge of an orange substance smeared across her cheek. Yaz had no idea what that could even be, but it looked _lethal_. "Who?"

Yaz held up the wooden frame with the black ad white picture inside. "Looks like an old photograph?"

Old could mean so many things when you were travelling inside the Tardis, sitting here in the middle of a random collection of alien space ship pieces, outer dimensional tape recorders (if the Doctor was to be believed in her throw away comments and explanations) and in front of an earth made visiphone that the Doctor swore was the thing to carry in the late 24th century. ("Nobody used it for calling. It was all about the Peffghoul detection. Catch them all!" the Doctor had said with a laugh. - " _What_ detection?" - "Peffghouls. Sneaky little blighters. Nearly drove the Arnessen colonies to extinction." - "Lovey, Doc, thanks. Sorry, I asked.")

The Doctor, momentarily distracted with her screwdriver giving off a high pitched sonic noise, leading her to quickly pick up a cloth that looked dusty and dirty and clean off the orange stuff with a slightly panicked expression. Yaz considered asking what that was all about and how dangerous it was to a normal human being like herself - but she knew if she let herself be sidetracked, then she wouldn't get an answer to her previous question.

"The lady," she repeated. "Who is she?"

The Doctor finally swished her long bangs out of her face to look at her with a furrowed brow. She looked at Yaz with that lost expression of a kitten who had no idea what you were talking about... until her eyes fell on the photograph in its wooden frame.

"Oh," she said. "You found River. Brilliant. I had wondered where that had wandered off to."

"Wandered... River? What?"

Snatching the picture out of Yasmin's hand the Doctor made a happy little sound and then - with her sleeve instead of the dusty rug - cleaned off the frame and then the glass. 

"Are you saying the picture moves around?"

"Well," the Doctor said with a shrug, "the Tardis moves room around. But even that doesn't explain all the places this keeps getting off to."

She sounded altogether too cheerful about a picture frame going off on its own adventures.

"River's always been her own woman," she said. "Had this on my desk at university for all those years and then... Nah, story for another time." She stuffed the picture into her coat pocket, but Yaz could still see the edge of the frame peak out.

"So you say. Doesn't answer my question. Who's River?" 

"Impressive," the Doctor said and reached past Yaz to grab a little toy car. She looked pleased.

At Yaz' raised eyebrow she said: "Collector's item."

"I'm sure," Yaz relented. 

Yasmin Kahn hadn't joined the police force because she was a dummy. She knew when someone was trying to switch topics - and she knew the Doctor had more secrets than a magician's stage props.

* * * 

Yasmin forgot about the picture until it turned up on her kitchen table and her mother asked: "That's not from a case? You're not bringing home evidence?"

"No!" she blurted, appalled. 

She pocketed the thing and showed it to Graham and Ryan. 

"Think the Doctor left it?"

"I don't know. She's been more scatterbrained than usual."

"She usually is," Graham pointed out, "when there's something big on her mind."

"Needs to learn to talk, that one," Ryan agreed. "Talk less, say more," he amended.

"She says a lot all the time." Yaz sighed. "It's more like none of us can make sense of even a third of it."

She returned the picture to the Tardis a few days later, watched the Doctor silently take note of it and go back to her calculations muttering all the while.

"So, who's River then?"

Yaz had met the master and learned about time lords, she knew about immortal Jack Harkness and Daleks. She'd seen the impossible, the improbable and the incomprehensible and come back alive. There wasn't anything out there that could surprise Yasmin Kahn.

"My wife," the Doctor said and smiled at the photograph with melancholic fondness.

Her mouth still hung open when the rest of the fam arrived. 

"Yaz? Something wrong?" Ryan asked.

She had no words. 

And, was she going crazy or had the _photograph_ just blinked at her?

* * *

"When I said, let's have a quiet day, relax somewhere," Graham complained, "and you said, let's go visit a forest, I didn't see this coming." 

The Doctor walked briskly ahead as if she hadn't heard.

"A library," Ryan said but made it sound half-questioning. 

Yaz could only shrug her shoulders. The Doctor had been her usual excited self. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in that nothing _was_ ordinary when you were travelling with the Doctor.

"Biggest library in history," the Doctor said, trying to explain.

"Yeah, but you said forest," Yaz reminded her, watching the Doctor wave a blank piece of paper around to have them taken into the inner part of the library.

"We're visiting friends," the Doctor explained to a random employee who seemed surprised to see them walk right in as if they did so every day.

"Visiting friends in a library?" 

At last they stood before CAL, the supercomputer core that made up the center of the library. 

"Passes for all of us please," the Doctor said cheerily. "And don't forget to download us before midnight.

The last thing she heard before the employee strapped her into what looked like a science fiction-y interrogation chair, was Graham asking: "Why? What happens at midnight?"

* * *

"Looks like earth." Yaz looked around confused. They'd come all this way to find themselves on a lawn in front of a small house. 

"Right now it does," a woman's voice said from close beside her and Yaz nearly jumped out of her skin. She hadn't heard anyone approach. She had no idea how she'd slipped from this moment to the next.

The rest of the family was there too, and there was the Doctor, a soppy smile on her face.

But it was the woman who had spoken who held Yaz's attention. 

She had seen her before, curly hair and bright, twinkling eyes.

In a photograph trapped in a wooden picture frame.

"You're not real."

"Rude," the woman said. "If not entirely incorrect." She gave Yaz a once over and considered the rest of the group. Finally she settled her gaze on the Doctor and her eyes held a warm glow. "Hello sweetie. Are you telling me I'm missing out on this you?"

The Doctor smiled at the other woman with an all encompassing enigmatic smile that held sadness and happiness, that was rain and sunshine and perhaps just a hint of stardust in a virtual plane. "River," she said. "I'm the one missing you."

River smiled, her smile radiating the same mix of feelings. "You remember," she said and wriggled her eyebrows, hiding the wetness in her eyes behind a mask as effectively as the Doctor would. She held out her hand, the Doctor took it. "Let's go inside, everyone," she suggested. 

Next moment they were on the bridge of a space ship - no movement had occurred he scene had shifted. 

"Having fun?" the Doctor asked.

"Charlotte and I, we have all of literature ever written to play with, sweetie. You didn't think we wouldn't find ways to have our own adventures in here?"

The Doctor laughed and then looked at Yasmin, Ryan and Graham. "This is River Song. She's brilliant," she said and while she didn't say anything more, the name held a story deep like an ocean, vast like space and endless like the Doctor.


End file.
